when we include
also our welfare in eternity? and may it not thus become manifest that
"godliness hath the promise of the life that now is, as well as of that
which is to come?" It would be difficult to say in what respect
believers "neglect the enjoyment of this life," or are "essentially
losers" by their religion. They will gratefully ascribe to it their
highest and purest happiness; and rather than part with it they will
cheerfully submit to "the loss of all other things," and even to
persecution and martyrdom itself. But it is asked, "If Christianity be
false, is it nothing that you are troubled with a thousand anxieties and
cares about what shall become of you after death? If Christianity be
false, is it nothing that day after day you have the fear of death
before your eyes? If Christianity be false, it makes you slaves while
you live, and cowards in death."[316] We might answer, If Christianity
be _true_, what then? but we prefer a different course: we say that the
reality of a future state is in nowise dependent on the truth of
Christianity, however much we may be indebted to Christianity for our
certain knowledge of it; that even on the principles of Atheism there is
no security against the everlasting continuance of self-consciousness,
any more than there is against the inevitable stroke of death; that
Christianity in either case assumes the fact, and addresses men as dying
yet immortal creatures, while it reveals a way in which those "who
through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" may be
delivered from that fear, and raised to "a hope full of immortality." As
death is not created or called into being by Christianity, so neither is
the awful future which lies beyond it: the Secularist not less than the
Christian has to do with it. Mr. Holyoake seems, at least occasionally,
to be sensible of this solemn truth. "I am as much concerned," he says,
"as this reverend gentleman can be, as to what shall be _the issue of my
own condition in the future_; I am as much concerned _in the solution of
this question_ as he is himself; and I believe that the view I
entertain, or that any of us may entertain, _conscientiously_, will be
our justification in that issue, if we should come to want
justification. When we pass through the inexorable gates of the future;
when we pass through that vestibule where death stands opening his
everlasting gates as widely to the pauper as to the king; when we pass
out her